Mcveigh Jurors Say Prosecutors Left No Doubts

DENVER — On April 24, Stephen Jones, lead defense lawyer for Timothy McVeigh, stood before the jury selected to hear the Oklahoma City bombing trial and made a bold promise: that he would prove his client innocent.

He didn't because, in the end, he couldn't. And on Friday, a federal jury sentenced McVeigh to death.

On Saturday, jurors said that even though they sentenced him to the ultimate punishment, it was the vote on guilt that was the most difficult.

After that vote, said Ruth Meier, "It took us a good hour, hour and a half for us to calm down so we could go into the courtroom."

Jurors said they took only one vote in both the guilt phase and the penalty phase.

Eleven of the 12 jurors told a news conference that the prosecution overwhelmed them with evidence that when pieced together left no doubt that McVeigh bombed the federal building.

Foreman Jim Osgood said that no one piece of evidence persuaded them--it was the entire package. "We didn't look at one piece of evidence. We didn't look at one witness," Osgood said.

Asked as a group what single question they would have of McVeigh, the 11 jurors answered in unison, "Why?"

Jones, McVeigh's lead lawyer, in the two years between the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building and the start of the trial, had spun a web of doubt about the prosecution that was designed to dissipate the public hatred of McVeigh that had coalesced almost immediately after his arrest on the day of the bombing.

The prosecution, meanwhile, ignored Jones and went about the task of boiling down more than 20,000 interviews, 7,000 pounds of physical evidence and tens of thousands of pages of documents into a streamlined case that took just 18 days to present.

Ultimately, the prosecution case was so overwhelming that by the time Jones rose to present his final argument on Thursday, his claim that he would prove his client's innocence had vanished.

And so Jones admitted McVeigh had been the bomber.

"He is not a demon, although his act was surely demonic," Jones declared in his final argument. "Mr. McVeigh's acts and thoughts did not arise in a vacuum. They didn't suddenly arise one night. It took planning and preparation. That's all true."

Jones's co-counsel, Richard Burr, voiced a view that similarly raised eyebrows when he said that because Americans as a whole had failed to call on the federal government to account for its actions in two bloody standoffs at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas, all citizens, not just McVeigh, bore some responsibility for the Oklahoma City blast.

This puzzling shift in the defense was viewed by some observers as a sellout of McVeigh; that in the face of a powerful prosecution case, his lawyers had opted to plead for mercy by conceding what the jury had decided on June 2 in returning a verdict of guilty on all 11 counts, including conspiracy and murder.

But some lawyers believe McVeigh was the architect of the shift.

Andrew Cohen, a Denver attorney who observed the trial, suggests that McVeigh, believing a death sentence was inevitable, directed Jones to portray him the way he has always felt--as a political prisoner who is prepared to die for his cause.

"Maybe we've been looking at this the wrong way all along," Cohen said. "Maybe Timothy McVeigh was never interested in saving his own life. Maybe instead he truly does consider himself a prisoner of war destined and willing to die a martyr for the ideological crime for which he was convicted."

Steven Lubet, professor of criminal law and director of the advocacy and ethics program at Northwestern University School of Law, agreed.

"As despicable as the crime is, it's a political crime, clearly," he said. "It's fair to assume that Jones and McVeigh talked it over and McVeigh wanted that defense, he wanted to be defended on the ground that he was somewhat justified in what he did."

Cohen added, "By arguing that the bombing was McVeigh's patriotic reaction to Waco, the defense's comments seemed more like a challenge or insult to the jury. But the two attorneys are far too intelligent and far too wily for me to believe that their tack was anything less than deliberate and purposeful."

"The client is the lawyer's boss," Cohen added. "So maybe McVeigh called the shot to go political instead of legal. We already know that McVeigh believed in his cause enough to kill for it.

"Maybe he was telling us all through his attorneys that he is willing to die for it, too."